"So, according to LaRouche, not only the 'extermination camps' didn't exist but the 'concentration camps' were inspired, if not supported by...Jewish bankers...This is even more insulting and sickening than the worst of the Holocaust deniers."
Ex-LaRouche followers on Factnet reply to those who support LaRouche or are undecided (debate beginning June 20, 2007):
LaRouche apologist "Steve" (aka "odd_one_2003"), Wed., June 20, 2007, 03:23 AM, 03:30 AM:
[Reply to "shadok," an anti-LaRouche participant on FactNet:]
Your post is old by now, but I am responding anyway, because you seem to have missed the thrust of my argument.
You say:
As for the "1.5 million" figure of the Jews murdered by "slave labor" (The Campaigner, "Zionism Is Not Judaism"), it is a typical case of holocaust denial. First the official figure is 5-6 millions, and OF COURSE the Nazis were racists (hello? on which planet are you living?)!!! They didn't kill the Jews and Gypsies for economic reasons, the extermination camps (which LaRouche deny to exist, he called them "concentration slave-labor camps") were costly financially to the Nazi's war machine. The Allied forces couldn't understand why they put so much efforts and resources in such enterprise. The only reason was not economic, it was racism. The "1.5 million" figure comes from a book called The Myth of the Six Million (1969) by David Hoggan, a friend of the neo-Nazi revisionist Liberty Lobby with which LaRouche was associated at the time.
[Steve attempts to answer the above quote:]
- LaRouche denies the camps existed. And he calls them slave labor camps. Which is it? Or are you saying he asserts they would have been slave labor camps had they existed?
- Look, maybe this guy Hoggan was the source of Lyn's figure and maybe that figure is in fact wrong. I don't know, I wasn't there, and the fact that it varies from the "official" figure means less than nothing to me. But I don't see how saying that the Nazis exterminated 1.5 million people can be construed as "Holocaust denia.l". That strains the English language well past the breaking point.
- Plus, I thought it was generally acknowledged that able-bodied Jews as well as many non-Jews were shipped to labor camps and worked under inhuman conditions. Only when they could no longer work were they targeted for death. Is this controversial? And didn't the German regime get economic value from their labor?
- Why is it so threatening to accept that there could have been an economic motivation behind the Holocaust? Is it because then it might be necessary to face the implications of those same economic principles playing out in our own period?
- Of course the Nazis were racist, and if you re-read what I wrote you may notice I never denied that. But nothing happens for just one reason. The camps existed for economic reasons. They were filled predominantly with Jews because the racist ideology of the Nazi party, as well as many common Germans, made them acceptable victims. And I'm sure many in the party were oblivious to the economic considerations, which after all, were somewhat esoteric. But the racists would accept the program as a means of ethnic cleansing, while the economic policy makers like Schacht would support it as the "final solution" to an otherwise unpayable debt structure.
- To say that this line of argument somehow denies Nazi racism or the reality of the Holocaust is simply ludicrous and defies reason.
[Steve again quotes shadok's posting from an earlier date:]
"To dismiss Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the nazi regime, [as] just "another faction" is ridiculous. I know it is embarrassing to discover some of LaRouche's sources of inspiration..."
- Well, I don't recall dismissing him. I think I said his views were useful but almost certainly not the whole story. Look at how actual policies get decided upon in the governments of today. It's always a coalition of forces that can agree on a policy for widely varying reasons. Look at immigration policy. Look at any of this stuff. It's sold to a credible public based on some unmitigated load of crap than even most of the nominal proponents know better than to believe. But they know a line that will sell.
- LaRouche "associated" with the Liberty Lobby? "Associated" is a nicely vague term, but it's a bit stronger than I would have used. I think LaRouche met with Carto (LaRouche will meet with widely diverse people without thereby declaring his allegiance to them) and if I'm not mistaken, there were some positive comments about LaRouche in The Spotlight. There may well have been sharing of information. As far as I know, that was it. Maybe this is an "association," but a fairly tenuous one, IMO.
Have fun,
--Steve
"shadok," Wed., June 20, 2007, 04:15 AM:
[Reply to Steve:]
"Why is it so threatening to accept that there could have been an economic motivation behind the Holocaust? "
I don't consider it as "threatening" but an insult to the victims, how their tragedy is being utilized. LaRouche's intellectual fraud is to consider the Nazi holocaust policy as mere "slave labor" camps ("Schachtian austerity").
The Nazi camps were divided into TWO different "categories":
1) the "concentration camps," i.e. "slave-labor"; and
2) the "extermination camps," i.e. the "final solution" to exterminate "inferior races."
The Jews and Gypsies were sent to the extermination camps and were killed almost straight away, regardless of any economic considerations. (The ancient Greeks knew that as a slave-owner you had to take care of your slave's health-- they considered their slaves as "assets.")
The "holocaust deniers" deny the existence of the "extermination camps," e.g. the row over the gas chambers etc. LaRouche, being an anti-Semite and groomed by the guys from the Liberty Lobby, endorsed their line about the Holocaust, and utilized the "concentration camps" case as "slave labor" camps, labelled them as "Schachtian austerity" and then blamed the British (and the Jewish bankers) for this...
So, according to LaRouche, not only the "extermination camps" didn't exist but the "concentration camps" were inspired, if not supported by... Jewish bankers (like Rohatyn).
This is even more insulting and sickening than the worst of the holocaust deniers. (It is, by the way, unproven, undocumented and gratuitous.)
"sancho," Wed., June 20, 2007, 07:59 AM:
I'll tell you what's wrong with that 1.5 million figure (apart from the Jew-hating part): Lyndon LaRouche is NOT a historian, so he is no way positioned to make an estimate, since he is NOT an historian. We saw that above, with his reference to the "Beyond Psychoanalysis" series as a "therapeutic response." He is NOT a therapist of any sort. Reading history books, reading psychiatry books makes one NEITHER a historian NOR a therapist. You LaRouche people really need to get a grip on reality: this guy could not handle elementary plane geometry, flunked out of a mediocre undergraduate program, and has misread--to the extent that he has read anything--Kant, Leibniz, etc. Guess why? Because he is NOT a philosopher. For that matter, he is NOT an economist, NOT an intelligence operative, and NOT a literary critic. You want a "therapeutic response?" Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
Read this too if you want a laugh at the World's Greatest Economist:
http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=100
The reason he likes to recruit off-balance young boys and girls is that they usually fall for his pretensions of grandeur because they don't know any better. True achievement in any one field--let alone nine--takes discipline, humility before the field of application, diligence, patience, and a high tolerance for frustration. These are qualities LaRouche has never acquired.
It is ALL hot air, kids.
"eaglebeak," Wed., June 20, 2007, 10:34 AM:
Odd-One [Steve]:
Did I read your post right? Did you really write the following about Alfred Rosenberg in your latest post?
"Well, I don't recall dismissing him. I think I said his views were useful but almost certainly not the whole story."
Do you really mean to say that Alfred Rosenberg's views were useful??? Or was that some kind of revealing typo?
Do you KNOW who Alfred Rosenberg was? Hint: top Nazi, ideological watchdog, Jew-baiter, close associate of Hitler. His "racial theories" were considered to be the basis for the entire Nazi race war against the Jews. Executed at Nuremberg.
Which of his views do you consider "useful"? If this was NOT a typo, I think you need deprogramming in the worst way.
"Have fun, Steve."
"eaglebeak," Wed., June 20, 2007, 01:37 PM:
Also, Odd-One:
The Labor Committee was quite close to Liberty Lobby in the 1978-80 period or thereabouts. Many Spotlight subscribers were New Solidarity subscribers, there were numerous meetings with Willis Carto and his sidekicks, and feature articles in New Solidarity and elsewhere by figures such as Scott Thompson retailed a variety of Liberty Lobby/neo-Nazi lines about the Holocaust, all of them false, but different.
A few examples:
(a) There was no Holocaust.
(b) It wasn't really a Holocaust--"only" 1.5 million Jews were killed. The 6 million figure is a fraud.
(c) People in the camps were worked to death, not exterminated (deliberate confusion between slave labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps).
(d) Okay, so millions of Jews were killed, but NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWS. They were killed because they were communists, trade unionists, whatever (this was LaRouche's famous "Green File" theory, which he uttered when he was trying to climb down from his no-Holocaust position).
(e) Auschwitz was not an extermination camp. The people who died there died principally of typhus, typhoid, etc. That's why their bodies had to be burned.
And on and on. You are simply ignorant of the history of what was printed in Labor Committee publications, and of the background.
I take it you probably weren't born yet. If you were born, you had not yet attained the age of reason, if you know what I mean.
Shadok is absolutely right--as people have posted on this site before--about the fundamental lack of economic motive for the Holocaust. When Hitler had to choose between economic enhancement of the war effort, and the ECONOMIC DRAIN that the Holocaust represented, he chose the Holocaust and the economic drain.
The claim that the Holocaust was the result of so-called Schachtian economics is false, a claim made by the ignorant and the ill-willed and the anti-Semitic.
Read some history. "Have fun."
"charltonrom," Wed., June 20, 2007, 02:08 PM:
Steve, I would like you to respond to the following:
I have not seen the infamous 1978 "Cult Origins of Zionism" pamphlet, I would very much like to; from what I have learned of Lyn's views since I left the org I find it highly plausible that it exists. According to some of the online sources (it's on Wikipedia) this is what Lyn wrote in the pamphlet:
"...the mythical "six million Jewish victims" of the Nazi "holocaust." This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive "appropriate technology" for the employment of "inferior races," a small fraction of the tens of million of others--especially Slavs--who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn proposes today. Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists.
Now if that's not a denial that EXTERMINATION CAMPS, NOT LABOR CAMPS, existed, I don't know what is.
The line of those of anti-Jewish bent (which continues on as an anti-Israel bent), is that "there were no death camps. There was hard work in the camps, ja, but no death camps."
1. Do you deny that Lyn said the above?
2. Do you, also, deny that there were EXTERMINATION camps, not just labor camps?
We wonders, aye, we wonders...
(I am informed that the "Cult Origins of Zionism" was an article in New Solidarity, not a pamphlet; the point remains.) [NOTE: The reference is to "New Pamphlet to Document the Cult Origins of Zionism," an article by LaRouche published in New Solidarity, Dec. 8, 1978 The word "pamphlet" in the headline is apparently a mistaken reference to the issue of The Campaigner (see below) that focussed on Zionism.--DK]
"borisbad," Wed., June 20, 2007, 05:54 PM:
There's a simple reason that LaRouche's emphasis on the economic roots of Hitler's Nazi experiment is germane to his anti-Semitism. By removing the race supremacy roots of Hitler and the Nazi Party, (1) you can shift the blame to Britain, the U.S., etc. for "imposing" economic austerity on Germany after World War One and remove blame from the Germans, and (2) you can then insist that any gov't that practices austerity in any form can be descried as Nazi and genocidal, including Israel, Jewish bankers like Rohatyn, etc. Now while there is much to be said about current financial policies of the IMF, World Bank, etc,. it is sheer demagoguery to equate all austerity with what the Nazis did, which is why we don't hold other fascist forms of gov't, like Mussolini's, to quite the same level of ignominy as we do the German Nazis. And besides to do so would get Helga [Zepp-LaRouche] upset with all her pretensions that German classical culture is the highest of all expressions of western civilization.
"eaglebeak," Wed., June 20, 2007, 06:32 PM:
Charltonrom--the reason you were confused about pamphlet vs. New Solidarity article is because there is a pamphlet--or rather, a Campaigner [issue]--called "Zionism Is Not Judaism" which is a compendium of really awful anti-Semitic writings, including by Jewish members of the LaRouche org like Mark Burdman and Paul Goldstein.
That's probably what the confusion was. That may be online too--I don't know.
"sancho," Wed., June 20, 2007, 07:06 PM and 07:43 PM:
The "Zionism is Not Judaism" Campaigner from 12/78 [can be found at]:
http://wlym.com/PDF-77-85/CAM7812.pdf
On the subject of flip-flops, here is an interesting paper from Dennis King's website:
https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/hostile.htm
which gives a good look inside the sausage factory that is LaRouche's thought process.
"earnest_one," Thurs., June 21, 2007, 11:54 AM:
Question:
Is/was LaRouche a "serious" anti-Semite (i.e., someone who would actually exterminate Jews if given absolute power) or is/was all of this ranting simply a way to attract attention, produce inflows of money, and stir things up?
A case could be made--at least in principle--that LL's rants are simply designed to "flush" out anti-Semitic support from the population, thus enabling intelligence agencies to spy on dangerous elements within the populace.
Here LL's method(s) would actually serve the Mossad, or some similar pro-Israel agency--it would all be an "operation," he would simply be a "fake" anti-Semite.
Can the above be discounted, completely?
"shadok," Thurs., June 21, 2007, 12:50 PM:
The short answer is: YES.
The longer answer is: You don t need to "exterminate" the Jews to be an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is racism; not all racists want to "exterminate" the so-called "inferior races" like the Nazis did. Com'on, just be serious one minute. There's nothing to gain, even from LaRouche's standpoint, to behave like a "fake anti-Semite." He's living in America, isn't he?, not Saudi Arabia....There is no special "higher game"...that's self-delusion. The Mossad don't care about LaRouche, who cares anyway? (I don't.)
"earnest_one," Thurs., June 21, 2007, 02:04 PM:
Reply to "shadok":
My question was qualified: I said "serious anti-Semite."
If he is NOT serious, then why is he considered so "dangerous" (King, et al.). Why such a fuss?
You say that the Mossad doesn't care about LaRouche. Fine, I believe that. But wouldn't they be interested in true anti-Semites, serious anti-Semites, trying to gain power internationally. Earlier in the thread, there was talk about some of LL's rants being picked up by the Arab world--that this was reason not to discount him. Indeed, "charltonrom" advised not to "underestimate" him.
If LaRouche was a serious anti-Semite, then the Mossad would have every reason to be interested in him.
If we take this view, then I simply ask: why all the attention from King (etc.) with hyperbole saying, roughly speaking, that LL is/was one of the most dangerous men alive? [Huh??--DK]
Obviously, he is a threat to naive young people, drawn into his bizarre cult--a threat to those who know nothing of NCLC's history. That is obvious; the rest isn't, at least to me.
"sancho," Thurs., June 21, 2007, 02:21 PM:
He's doing a good job of exterminating the Jews in and around his own organization.
Start there.
"shadok," Thurs., June 21, 2007. 02:44 PM:
[Reply to "earnest_one":]
why don't you ask this question to Dennis King?
There are posts here from people who deny LaRouche is an anti-Semite!
Now, you're trying to "rate" his anti-Semitism...from a scale of 1 to 10 maybe? I think it's going nowhere. LaRouche is clearly an anti-Semite (I won't rate him because I don't care). Is he a major threat to the Jews in America or in the world? Of course not! LaRouche has no power except over his own adepts, being Jewish or not. I agree with you.
"charltonrom," Thurs., June 21, 2007, 05:19 PM:
To suppose, Earnest One, that Lyn is some sort of lightning rod/agent to attract the "real" anti-Semites, is an overcomplex explanation. I don't think the issue is what the Mossad is or is not doing. For me it's enough that there is a decades-long pattern from Lyn of anti-Semitic utterances, and it's not just a prejudice. General Kranko is helping to poison the discursive waters, here and abroad, with his vile insinuations and allegations.
There is an international mobilization--a conspiracy in fact--to dissolve the "Zionist Entity." It's been underway since the 1948 war. It appears that plurality factions in the Mideast favor the destruction and annihilation of Israel. The roots of this sympathy are multiple but in the main, to my eye, lie right in the Koran and the other Islamic canonical writings, where Jews are referred to as apes and pigs and accused of having poisoned Mohammad.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27737
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_and_the_Jews
Those who deny this fundamental fact, of a publicly-announced intent from leadership factions of the Muslim world towards the destruction of Israel, are either saps, ignorant, in willful denial, or are, like LaRouche, abetting it.
--------------------------
I find the above a fascinating debate that brings out many subtleties of LaRouche's crypto-Nazism (my term, not that of the debate's participants). The postings of "Steve" (who apparently is either a current member of the LaRouche organization or a former member still friendly to LaRouche) show how, if one is serious about defending LaRouche, one is sooner or later forced into at least a partial defense of Nazi war criminals. In Steve's case, it's Alfred Rosenberg, but on Wikipedia one can find numerous examples of ignorant young LYM members making excuses for Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Waldheim, Karl (the "Butcher of Tartu") Linnas, etc. to justify LaRouche's own defense of and open political identification with such individuals.
At least one of the persons posting above seems to be just beginning to grapple with the issue of LaRouche's nastiness. Individuals who leave a cult often go through a period of vacillation (it's called "floating") that can last for years and may involve concocting rationalizations for the organization and its misdeeds.
One of the participants in this interchange raised the idea of whether LaRouche is connected to Israel's Mossad. The idea that LaRouche is running a "false flag" operation has been around a long time (although usually the speculations have focussed on the KGB). I have never seen any evidence that would lead me to hold the Mossad theory as credible, but I have seen massive evidence that LaRouche has been, for most of his life, deadly sincere in his hatred of Jews and the State of Israel--just like his Jew-hating shoe salesman father before him.
I should also point out that Israel is a state so protective of Jews that it will release dozens of Arab terrorists in order to secure the release of a single Jew. I have no doubt that Mossad, like any good intelligence agency, is capable of many murky deeds, but I can't see it collaborating in the recruitment--and the mental enslavement for decades--of hundreds of Jews (the majority of the LaRouche organization at one point) by the likes of Lyn and Helga LaRouche. If one needs to run a false flag organization, there are much, much easier ways of doing it.
So I guess my answer on the Mossad issue boils down both to the lack of evidence and to William of Occam's razor. If this makes me a swinish grovelling British empiricist, so be it.